


the exchange rate of resurrection

by unicyclehippo



Series: Blue Girls Have The Most Fun [35]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, jester dies but she gets better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25218706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicyclehippo/pseuds/unicyclehippo
Summary: prompt: she bargains her chi/monk abilities away when she's the only one around to try to bring Jester back.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Series: Blue Girls Have The Most Fun [35]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824289
Comments: 3
Kudos: 79





	the exchange rate of resurrection

She’s laid out on the cold floor of the cavern and Beau has been staring for… Fuck. What seems like forever.

Impossible. Impossible. She can’t be gone—not when it’s just Beau here. She _can’t_ be.

‘Impossible,’ Beau says. It echoes in this cavern in odd and shifting ways, against the uneven walls and between the shivering, dripping columns of stone and up toward the roof of natural stone.

_Impossible-ossible-oss-ss-_

The word finally fades. The world is no quieter for it. Beau’s skull echoes the denial over and over and over until the word mutates. Until it loses all its meaning and gains one anew. _Possible possible possibly possibility_ , her mind returns, brain tugging and turning the idea over in her mind. _Possible_ , Beau thinks and reaches out. She takes the haversack—eyes blank, unseeing, she gently removes it from where it is being worn, careful not for the haversack but for herself, doing her utmost to not touch cold skin. Flipping it open, Beau reaches in and lifts out the odd, softly pulsing form of the dodecahedron from within.

Beau’s eyes wander toward it, the meandering, vaguely absent path of someone with a major head injury or who has entirely shut down from shock. She hefts the dodecahedron into her lap, curls around it. Plants her hands on either side and, eyes fixed onto the grey glowing stone, she wills herself into it.

The sensation is familiar. Much like the first beacon they had carried with them, it feels like very little time passes before she is standing in a field of grey, motes of light like fireflies all around her and stretching out in every direction.

Possibility.

Surely here, in this space, _anything_ would be possible.

‘My friend is dead,’ Beau calls out. ‘I don’t know if you’re real or if I’m wasting my time but—I – I need her back. Please.’ The words stop in her throat as fear clutches her. Beau is smart enough to know exactly what such words mean when a god hears them. She breathes in. Watches the flickers of her possibilities, so many of them hard-faced and sharp as she is now. Those are the ones she looks to and she doesn’t think she’s hallucinating to see them nod to her. _Keep going. Do it_. Calm settles over her when she breathes in and out. Beau lays out her offer into this muted space. ‘I’ll do anything.’

Even gods don’t want anything when it comes from her, Beau decides after what feels like an age hovering in the expanse. She really mustn’t have anything to offer. She’s a breath from leaving, has been on the cusp of it ever since she entered, but a tug of spite, maybe, or a crooked kind of hope keeps her in place.

And why not? There’s nothing outside of the beacon except for Jester.

_Anything?_

Beau turns. Glances around herself for a sign of who—or what—the voice could have been. Good god, bad god, evil entity? She wonders, fleetingly, if she cares and quickly dismisses that out of hand. She doesn’t.

‘Anything,’ Beau confirms.

The woman appears ahead of her—and Beau knows instinctively that it is ahead of her, despite the fact that there is no up or down or forward or back in this place. She is small, smaller than Beau, all in inky black that flows out behind her like an endless train to a midnight gown. Over where a face would be is a mask of pure unadorned porcelain. There is a thin impression of a mouth and eyes but no opening for either.

_Do you know what this place is?_

‘No,’ Beau admits.

_Do you know what these are?_ The gown shifts and from the darkness of her form comes an arm and a long, delicate hand that wears a black glove.

Beau wonders idly whether the glove gives form to the dark, or whether it’s just for aesthetics. Her eyes follow the pointing finger to the motes of light. She nods. ‘Possibility. My futures. What…could be.’

_Very good._ The woman cocks her head to the side, further than a woman ought to be able to. The gesture is reminiscent of a bird. _You wish to save her_.

‘Yeah. I’ll do anything.’

_You have said that already. But she is quite dead. She has been for hours._

Beau swallows hard. The effort of it hurts. Her throat is dry, as are her eyes. ‘I know.’

_So what you ask is not for me to spare her, or save her, but to return her to a new possibility. A new fate._

‘I—yes.’

_At the moment of her death, she was severed from them._ The presence of this woman forbids argument or pleading. Cold wafts out from her and as Beau tries to focus on her, the depth of her gown falls endlessly into itself. She swears she sees something in that void, some gossamer thread of the same silver-grey as this place, and Beau has to blink, to look away quickly, or else be lost trying to find that string and the next, forever falling into the dark. _Tell me, would you give your own life for hers?_

Beau doesn’t hesitate. ‘Yes.’

_Death is my domain, and the undead the focus of my ire. An aberration of nature’s path. To return someone to their body is not done lightly. Would you give all that you are over to me? Would you take responsibility for her and all that she does, if it be by your will that she is returned?_

‘Yes.’

There is only a faint impression of a mouth in that porcelain face, but Beau is sure that she sees it smile. _Very well_ , the woman says. _But this will not require anything from you. It will require everything. Be warned. Do you still ask this of me?_

As though their minds were connected in that instant, knowledge – alien, immense – touched Beau’s mind and she knew what it was that the Matron of Death required of her. Beau smiles.

‘Yeah. She’s worth it—you’ve seen her, haven’t you? She’s worth it.

* * *

Beau is jettisoned from the beacon back into her body. She feels stiff, as though she had been sitting for days and days in this position; her neck gives an almighty _pop_ when she tilts it to try and ease the tension. Glancing over, uneasy, to the body in front of her, Beau forces herself to watch and wait. It takes a moment to see it, terrified as she is to linger on such a painful sight, but it isn’t her imagination that causes Jester’s chest to rise and fall with even breaths.

Beau cries now for a very long time. She moves painfully to sit at Jester’s head and retakes her position. Bo laid across her knees, she sits into meditation, prepared to defend her friend until she wakes.


End file.
